Broadcasters have, understandably enough, been adding content warnings to reports about Sara Sharif, the 10-year-old girl who allegedly died at the hands of her father, stepmother and uncle, after two years of abuse.
“This article features details that some people might find distressing” is the BBC’s slightly strange way of putting it, as if significant numbers of people are undistressed by reading about the horrific injuries found, an Old Bailey jury has heard, on the child’s body. And also by the evidence, sickening in its implications, that neighbours heard disturbing noises but did not report them. And by another disquieting detail, from a phone call said by the prosecution to have been made to the emergency services by Sara’s father. “I legally punished her, and she died,’’ he is alleged to have said.
Given that comparable warnings are not routinely attached to content about child suffering and death in, say, Afghanistan, Sudan, or Ukraine, or in the Israel-Gaza war, you could easily conclude that the British public is peculiarly sensitive about the welfare of the young and vulnerable on its own territory.
In reality, as the comment in that phone call may have reminded anyone robust enough to read the article, children are still denied, in England and Northern Ireland, the legal protection that adults have against physical punishment. Live in the right place, you can still hit them. Or “smack” or “tap”, as the champions of this practice still prefer to call it. Yes, there really are people dedicated to the cause of lawfully inflicting pain on children. Anne Atkins, the revered Thinker for the Day, is among those supporting the “Be Reasonable” campaign, urging the legal status quo. It allows child discomfort, if I have this right, if it can be defined as “transient and trifling”.
Scotland ended confusion by outlawing physical punishment of children in 2020; Wales in 2022.
The closest to reform in England would appear to be this new confirmation of her position from the – initially equivocating – children’s commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza: “A ban on smacking is a necessary step to keep children safe and to stop lower-level violence from escalating”. Now that they are “embedded”, she says, the Welsh and Scottish bans have shown that England, also, needs to ban the existing “reasonable chastisement” defence. At the time of the Welsh ban, the then education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, said there was nothing wrong with a “light smack on the arm”. Wes Streeting, in opposition, also declined to condemn the practice, resorting to an argument that is, admittedly, still considered compelling in parts of social media where people hanker for the days of ye olde blacking factories. “As a child who was smacked by their parents from time to time,” he said, “I don’t think it did me any harm”.
Later, the main parties were alike in ignoring advice from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, urging reform of the “unjust and dangerously vague” English law to be included in party manifestos. In fact, as much as it is a cause for shame, the determination to defy in England and Northern Ireland this international trend in improved child protection demonstrates that in an often divided country, at least one subject – child-hitting – reliably brings harmony.
After the 2012 London riots, for instance, David Lammy said Labour-imposed constraints on chastisement had contributed to disorder. “We should return to the law as it existed for 150 years before it was changed in 2004”.
The then mayor, Boris Johnson, whose upbringing means he probably knows more about domestic hitting than most, sympathised: “There ought to be some confirmation that the benefit of the doubt will always be given to parents in these matters…”
It could be a sign of infinitesimal progress that in the aftermath of the recent riots no serious politician suggested that with a bit more parental barbarity, younger rioters might have held back. Even Lammy is presumably aware of research confirming that far from discouraging misbehaviour, the physical punishment of children does – surprise! – the opposite. A 2021 summary of longitudinal studies by Anja Heilmann and others offered this to policymakers: “The evidence is consistent and robust: physical punishment does not predict improvements in child behaviour and instead predicts deterioration in child behaviour and increased risk for maltreatment. There is thus no empirical reason for parents to continue to use physical punishment.” In a further setback for hitting advocates, countries that have outlawed it have not been overwhelmed by mischievous prosecutions of virtuous parents.
The best excuse for the Blair government’s endorsement in its Children Act of the physical chastisement of children is that, around 20 years ago, even some clinicians rejected the moral imperative to protect the defenceless. In the BMJ, one advised what was not then considered faintly obscene: punishment “administered with the open hand to the buttocks or the extremities”.
But in 2004, an amendment tabled by a Labour MP, David Hinchliffe, to give children the same legal protection as adults, was supported by every significant UK child protection agency. Incredibly, you might think, his colleagues were
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whipped to ensure that the perpetrators of physical punishment were the ones protected.
Hinchliffe has since recalled Tony Blair telling him it was “a notch too far”. “I have often wondered,” he wrote to the Guardian, after the Welsh ban was introduced, “how many of the more than 800 children killed during the near two decades since might just possibly not have lost their lives if we had introduced that very modest and quite simple reform.”
Now that Labour has neglected, like the Tories, to promise this simple reform, while children continue to be killed at the rate of one a week, such speculation is likely to persist. As is the reluctance of neighbours to report what sounds like extreme punishment when it might only be a traditional, Zahawi-style “light slap”.
Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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